Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus that can perform wireless communications with an external apparatus.
Description of the Related Art
A recent portable telephone is equipped with a camera and can share an image captured by the camera with other portable telephones.
On the other hand, it is conventionally known that a digital camera having a wireless communication function can transmit a captured image to a portable telephone. For example, as discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2009-171491, a digital camera can wirelessly transmit image data acquired beforehand to another device via wireless LAN connection.
Compared to a case where two or more portable telephones share image data, the following problems arise when image data is shared between a camera and a portable telephone.
First, when two or more portable telephones share image data, it is feasible for each portable telephone to enhance the security by limiting sharing targets with reference to mutually registered information (e.g., telephone numbers and related ID values). Similarly, enhancing the security is feasible for a digital camera by using device information required to identify each individual camera (e.g., ID information uniquely allocated to each individual camera) instead of using the telephone number.
The above-described sharing of image data when it is performed between two or more portable telephones is not a nuisance act for each user because information required in mutual authentication can be easily exchanged through a customary procedure of exchanging telephone numbers.
On the other hand, the above-described sharing of image data when it is performed between a camera and a portable telephone tends to become a nuisance act for a user because registering mutual information between the camera and each portable telephone owned by other user is unusual compared to the above-described registration performed between two or more portable telephones. In addition, performing the above-described registration for each of portable telephones owned by a plurality of friends is not realistic because it takes a long time to repetitively perform the same procedure.